


brave new world

by scorpiod



Category: Planet Terror (2007)
Genre: F/F, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Canon, Pregnancy, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-07
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-10 01:55:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12288759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scorpiod/pseuds/scorpiod
Summary: The world ends. Life goes on. Dakota falls in love.





	brave new world

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SadieFlood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SadieFlood/gifts).



> 1\. There is the briefest mention of vomit. The rating is Mature mainly for canon-typical swearing and allusions to violence. 
> 
> 2\. So much thanks to my beta and all my cheerleaders!
> 
> 3\. It was a pleasure writing this! When I first saw the request, I was definitely shaking in my boots but ultimately I really enjoy writing this and I hope it's something you can enjoy :)

Cherry shoots down one of those _sickos_ with ease, her daughter tucked to her back--a high rolling hurricane, shotgun for legs--or leg, in this case. It’s easy now, easy as pie or 1-2-3, to kill the raging infected before they get too close and Cherry is a natural at it.

Under the bright Mexican sunlight, she looks like the second coming, the Virgin Mary alive again in this century. 

_That’s some evil dead shit_ , said one of the men following them--they’ve picked up stragglers and strays, lost and weary and looking for a place to call home again--gawking with awe at Cherry, all in white, her little daughter cooing on her back, as if delighted to watch her mommy blow holes in infected heads. 

Dakota shrugs. “I’ve never seen that movie.”

The man tries to explain-- _he attached a chainsaw to his hand, you see_ , like that’s supposed to be impressive.

Dakota’s throat has stopped going dry, when she looks at Cherry Darling in all of her glory now, getting used to the sight, but watching her do her dance of death is the highlight of the day.

Cherry emerged from the wreckage of small town Texas, bright clean and reborn.

*

 _Reach up_ , Dakota shouts at her, at crying Cherry Darling, mascara running, lips red and gore splattered. _Reach up_ , she shouts again and she thinks--

_We’re gonna leave her behind, Cherry is gonna die on the ground with her boyfriend and she will just be another dead girl who didn’t make it out alive, even if she’s the one that saved us all_

Without thinking, without even looking, Cherry reaches up and wraps her arm around the rope, holding on impossibly tight as they drag her up to safety.

Dakota reaches down for her, pulling her up, Cherry still staring at the shrinking corpse of El Wray, going going _gone_ , until he’s just a spec, left behind.

*

Dakota plays midwife when Cherry gives birth. 

She used to be a doctor, and all that. “We still need doctors,” Cherry tells her.

“We still need you,” she says, with a curl of her lips that Dakota can’t help but stare at, even now.

Cherry has a way of talking that makes Dakota want to do what she wants, draws her in--it draws in all the other survivors too, their little community growing larger by the day, expanding into a village.

Dakota shakes her head. “I’m not a doctor anymore. Just like you’re not a go-go dancer anymore.”

Cherry’s lips twist, frowning, eyes narrowed. “Why do you always do that?”

She’s annoyed her, Dakota can tell. _Sorry, Cherry, it’s just facts. It’s a whole new world now._

But Dakota is still there, with her needles full of salvaged drugs, the few unexpired ones they’ve dug up on small raids, looting abandoned hospitals and desolate pharmacies--it’s not safe to give an epidural now but for after, later, she’s gonna need it. 

She teaches Cherry how to give birth--that is one thing she can do now, that isn’t violence and death, that’s more than surviving. _Push. Breathe. Suck it up_ , when Cherry breaks and rages at her-- _motherhood is pain._

“You’re such an asshole,” Cherry says after, a wane smile on her face, tired and sweaty and hair sticking up, plastered to her forehead. The rage has gone out of her. She outstretches her arm. “Give me my girl.” 

Dakota takes a little too long to respond. 

It’s been nine months since her son died and holding the newborn in her arms makes her wanna--

She doesn’t finish that thought

_I used to be a mother too._

“She’s beautiful,” Dakota sobs. 

*

 _We’re not calling them zombies_ is a conversation they have right after, flying high to Mexico. Cherry uncharastically quiet--softened around the edges, hand going to her belly every now and then. Black lines of make up staining her face. 

One of the girls ( _stage name: Peaches, real name Maggie_ ) says, “So are all the zombies dead now?” 

“Don’t use the _Z word_ , one of them says, cringing. “It sounds stupid.”

“This shit is stupid,” says one of the twins, both of them rolling their eyes in tandem. “It’s all fucking stupid.” 

“He called them sickos,” Cherry says, soft and choking on the words.

“Yeah, that’s a good way to describe my husband,” Dakota says, not thinking, free word association, before she throws up on the plane and passes out, exhaustion hitting her.

She wakes up, cheek pressed against metal floor, a soft hand on her face, another pulling her hair back. The warmth of skin to skin contact shocks Dakota back to life, jump starting her heart. 

_Tammy!_ She thinks, remembering the last soft hands to touch her face, but when her vision clears, it’s not her girlfriend.

“Hey, come back to us,” Cherry Darling says. Dakota’s vision is stars and it turns Cherry into the sun.

( _Dakota came out of the apocalypse with a dead girlfriend and a dead husband and a dead mother and a dead son and a dead father, and she doesn’t know why she keeps putting one foot down after another except sheer force of habit_ )

*

Cherry calls her _worldly_ and Dakota chokes a laugh. 

“I’ve never been out of Texas until now,” Dakota says, reloading her gun. Her gun was dug out of a scrap yard, fixed up by a farmer whose family needed protection.

“Yeah, well I’m a small town Texas girl and you are a _fancy_ doctor.” Cherry says fancy like it’s an insult, a curl of disdain to it that comes from a lifetime of being a have-not. "No offense," she adds. 

“I’m not a doctor anymore,” Dakota reminds her.

“Yeah, yeah, well, you _were_ a doctor and that’s pretty fuckin’ important when the world ends.” A pause, as she fiddles with the semi-automatic that she straps to her leg. 

Cherry’s gun is magic. It fires on command. It bends to Cherry’s will, the flare of gunpowder like a light in the darkness. Like El Wray, she never misses either--not anymore. Dakota doesn’t know if she ever did. 

Cherry’s smile warms up the night like the flash of her gun. “I’m saying you’re fuckin’ important.”

Dakota doesn’t know how to respond to that. Her face is heated, flushed. 

“I wanted to be a doctor too, you know,” Cherry adds, rambling on now. She cleans her guns the way Dakota showed her how to clean guns--the perks of a sheriff father. “But med school's expensive.”

“You should have done it,” Dakota tells her, the beginnings of a hysterical giggle working it’s way out of her throat. “It’s not like we gotta pay the loans off anymore.”

Cherry snorts. “Yeah, hindsight’s 20/20 and all that shit.” She cocks the gun. “I wanted to be a stand up comedian,” she says, standing up, giving her best little curtsy, that left over flair for dramatics. She fumbles with a cigarette. Can’t smoke, not while pregnant, but Cherry likes to grab the thing, fiddle with it in her hand. Hard to give up a life long habit. 

“You’d be good at it,” Dakota says. 

Cherry scoffs. “Everyone says that. It seems like a stupid dream now.”

“It’s not stupid,” Dakota says. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make people smile.” 

Cherry doesn’t say anything, but her cheeks go a little flushed, turning pink. "Well, aren't you a peach," she says, the edge of sarcasm in her voice, but it's faint. She doesn't mean it that way. She licks her lips, a nervous tic.

It’s cute, the blush on her face, the way it makes her glow. She wonders if they match, Dakota’s skin overheated and Cherry all red.

Not that Dakota says anything about it.

*

“I’m not fuckin’ fragile,” Cherry says, a little later, or a lot later. It's hard to keep track of time now. “You don’t gotta treat me like I’m gonna break.” 

“I never said you were,” Dakota says, her best professional voice that’s no longer necessary, not a doctor anymore and Cherry certainly isn’t her patient, but she can’t stop carrying herself any other way but this. “This is just how it’s done.”

She has rubbing alcohol and gauze pads, blood staining them. She has a needle full of sweet, blissful painkillers. Cherry is not bleeding anymore, but the wound on her arm, it’s gonna scar. 

“I don’t need the speech you give for everyone else,” Cherry says, gritting her teeth. “I don’t need that shit either, just give me some tylenol.” 

Dakota doesn’t know why Cherry resists, makes it harder on herself. Her teeth are clenched. Her muscles tense. Blood clots. Cherry is made of the same steel that make up her new leg. 

“I’m just trying to treat our fearless leader,” Dakota says, a hint of a smirk. Just a hint. She keeps it professional. 

Cherry is caught off guard. “I’m not fearless,” she says, softening around the edges. Tension runs out, through her spine, down her arms. Body slack. It’s pointless, though, this protest. It doesn’t matter if Cherry is terrified while she mows down infected. She may as well be fearless. 

_You are to us. We need you._

Dakota patches her up. Then gently, delicately, Dakota presses a kiss to Chery’s thigh, where all the scar tissue is, where the limb severed.

“Oh, _baby_ ,” Cherry breathes. 

*

She’s turned a little wild, out here by the ocean. Got her gun, got her bullets, and maybe a little too enthusiastic about keeping sickos and people off Cherry. 

Got her needles too but the days of studying in med school are so far away now, and so are the days of walking around in a white lab coat. She wears strips of clothing now--too hot for much else--or full body covering like armor, like Cherry’s all white outfit except she’s never in white. She doesn’t like it, not on her--blood stains it too badly, and it looks like dirty reddish brown eventually.

It’s not all violence; it’s healing sometimes too, it’s patchwork people and scar tissue and putting the vestiges of who she was before all of this to good use--but there’s something about living on the edges of the earth, in between between falling off into the ocean or disappearing into the ancient holy temples--that drives Dakota a little loose around the edges.

“I don’t really know who I am anymore,” she tells Cherry over drinks--stale beer. Expired soon. Tastes like piss She keeps drinking. 

She doesn’t think Cherry can understand that--she’s a built a whole new world. Everyone looks up to her.

“I was Dakota Block, and before that I was Dakota McGraw and I don’t think I want to be either of those anymore.”

Cherry kicks up her leg, resting it on the table--she’s removed the rifle attached to her for now, and it makes her look strangely bare like this, without that weapon of mass destruction attached to her body. “You can be Dakota then. Just Dakota.”

“Really? Is this my Go Go Dancer name?”

“It’s your outlaw name,” Cherry says with a smirk. Takes a long slug of the piss-beer. 

Dakota laughs, loud and heavy. It rolls over both their skins, fills up the small bunk they’re made their hole in. Cherry’s one-year-old girl sleeps on. It’s good for her to get used to the sound of laughter.

“What about you?” Dakota asks. She’s starting to feel it, a little, the buzz, around her ears and her chest, if not exactly drunk. “You ever gonna tell us your real name?” 

Cherry shrugs. Cherry has forgone make up since the world ended, ended up with several new scars now, and she’s still as drop dead gorgeous as she was the first time Dakota laid eyes on her. “I think Cherry is working out pretty good for now.” 

“It sure has,” Dakota says and Cherry winks at her.

*

In an abandoned gas station down on the outskirts of what used to be Tulum, Mexico, Cherry grabs some coke out of the broken freezer. It’s warm, _tastes disgusting_ , she says, but she drowns it all down and takes a few more for the road.

“I missed this shit. Haven’t you?” Cherry asks her.

_(things Dakota misses now that they are living in the end of the world: toilet paper, working bathrooms, cold beer, root beer, klondike bars, Tammy, her baby boy)_

“Yeah,” Dakota agrees.

Later, after Cherry’s little girl is put to sleep, Cherry kisses her; she tastes like warm stale coke and sand, the taste of death lingering, almost copper-sweet.

 _Sorry, baby_ , she says, when she pulls away, sheepish, wiping her mouth, but that’s okay--Dakota hasn’t been able to get the taste of death out of her mouth since day one, and Cherry’s mouth makes her feel _alive_ , blood pumping under her skin, reminding her she’s still here, warm and real and solid.

*

Dakota stares, for a little too long, at Cherry's sleeping back, at her arm protectively wrapped around her baby--not an infant anymore, almost two. Or so they think. She looks two, but they’ve been doing this for too long now. Time fades, days and months and years bleeding into each other, no more calendars to help keep track. All they got is scratch marks against the walls and the growing children in the community, Cherry’s baby conceived on the first day of this, marking how long it’s been.

“Hey,” Cherry says. She’s been noticed. Dakota’s hair on the back of her neck stands up. She feels like an interloper. A creep, being this kind of selfish. Longing for the days of when she had her own baby to wrap her arm around, her own girlfriend to nuzzle into at night. 

She’s hungry, touch-starved. Starved in general.

“Come here,” Cherry says.

Cherry’s head is raised, perked up, staring back at her, but otherwise remains in position, curled up like a momma bear over her defenseless child. 

“I don’t want to bother you, I was just--”

“You can sleep here,” Cherry tells her. It falls silent, heavy. “If you want.”

It’s not the first time they slept together, curled up with one another to keep each other warm, but that was before the baby was born. 

She takes the invitation, walking gingerly over to her, waiting to be pushed away-- _can’t Cherry see her hunger? How much she wants what she has?_ \--but instead, Cherry grabs her and pulls her in. Wraps her arm around her waist as Dakota tucks herself in against her back.

And together, they cosleep like that--Cherry protecting her baby and Dakota protecting Cherry--safe from the world outside. 

*

The apocalypse, like all things, comes to an end eventually.

They have ham radios. They have walkie talkies. They have radio signals bouncing up throughout the sky.

 _The infection has been eradicated_ , the crackly voices on the other lines say, in English and Spanish. _It’s gone. We have a cure. We have immunity._

It’s been four years. 

They haven’t seen a _sicko_ in almost six months. _Peace_ is a loaded, dangerous word to use but it feels like it might be in reach.

“What do you say?” Cherry asks her, holding a sleeping three year old in her arms. “You wanna go back to society? Go back home?”

( _Paloma_ , that’s what Cherry named her. _It means dove. Doves are peaceful. I think that’s what we need_ )

“I like it here,” she tells Cherry--here next to an old temple of an ancient god, backs against the ocean. _I was a doctor and you were a go-go dancer and I like it here so much better._ “This is home now.”

Their people may not want that. Some will leave. Some will choose to stay. It’ll be a much smaller piece of paradise soon.

Cherry smiles up at her. “I was hoping you’d say that.”


End file.
